AUSTRALIA
ANU students’ data hacked
Top-ranked Australian National University (ANU) yesterday said hackers late last year breached its cyberdefenses to obtain sensitive data, including students’ bank account numbers and passport details going back 19 years. The breach was only discovered two weeks ago and was carried out by “a sophisticated operator,” ANU said, without elaborating. “National community agencies are recruiting directly out of ANU,” International Cyber Policy Centre head Fergus Hanson said. “To have information about particular people who are working in different departments ... that would be very useful.”
INDIA
Nipah virus resurfaces
The deadly brain-damaging Nipah virus has resurfaced in the southern state of Kerala a year after it killed 17 people, state officials said yesterday. A 23-year-old student tested positive for the virus, which is transmitted to humans through direct contact with infected bats, pigs or other people. Kerala Minister of Health K.K. Shailaja told reporters that four other people had Nipah-like symptoms and that another 80 people were being monitored, including some who were in close contact with the student. “There is no need for panic,” he told reporters.
INDIA
Climbers took risk knowingly
Eight climbers believed to be dead on a treacherous Himalayan mountain “knowingly risked” their lives by changing their plans without permission, an official said yesterday. Military helicopters searching for the four Britons, two Americans, an Australian and an Indian on Monday spotted five bodies on the Nanda Devi Mountain. The group, led by experienced British climber Martin Moran, had last month been given permission to scale the eastern peak of the mountain, but Moran’s mountaineering company announced on Facebook on May 22 after the group reached a second base camp that they planned to attempt “an unclimbed peak” 6,477m high. “This mountain range is more difficult to scale than Mount Everest. They knowingly risked their lives,” an Uttarakhand State official said.
TURKMENISTAN
Bicycle world record broken
The nation on Monday broke the record for the longest parade of cyclists riding in single file, the Guinness World Records company said, in the latest bizarre record set by the central Asian country. A Guinness adjudicator judged that the single-file parade of 2,019 cyclists riding through the capital, Ashgabat, broke a record previously held by India, the TDH state information agency reported. The parade covered a distance of 3.3km, the report said. Guinness confirmed the new world record in an e-mail. The record was set in honor of World Bicycle Day on Monday.
LEBANON
Lone attacker kills four
A lone gunman killed four members of the security forces in the city of Tripoli overnight before blowing himself up, officials said yesterday. “The shooting spree resulted in the deaths of two members of the Lebanese army and two members of the internal security forces,” a security official said. The gunman, reportedly a militant recently released from prison, sowed panic in the streets late on Monday, as Muslims prepared for the first day of Eid al-Fitr, the feast marking the end of Ramadan. The attacker was eventually cornered in a residential building and killed himself by detonating an explosives vest that he was wearing.
TURKEY
No step back in missile deal
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan yesterday said that it was out of the question for the country to take a step back from its deal with Moscow to buy Russian S-400 anti-aircraft missile defense systems. Speaking to reporters after morning prayers, Erdogan also said that an offer from the US to sell Patriot missiles was not as good as the Russian offer. Last week, a top Pentagon official said the consequences would be “devastating” for the country’s joint F-35 fighter program and its cooperation with NATO if the country went ahead with plans to buy the Russian anti-aircraft weapon system.
UNITED STATES
All-inclusive art spreading
Touchable versions of photographs and paintings are adding a new dimension to inclusiveness as museums nationwide make themselves more accessible to people with disabilities. At the American Alliance of Museums’ expo in New Orleans late last month, two exhibitors showed different approaches: Tactile Studios had flat reproductions with slightly raised, slick outlines and details, while 3DPhotoworks used digital artists to turn scanned paintings and photographs into 3D art, with sensors that touched off descriptions of the figures into which they were set.
FRANCE
Lighter helps identify victim
Police on Monday said that they had identified the body of an Indian national found in a sack by the road side in the country’s north thanks to a cigarette lighter found in the dead man’s pocket. Police said the clue had proved distinctive enough to help lead to the detention in Belgium of another Indian suspected of murder. The cigarette lighter stamped “Kroeg Cafe” led to a breakthrough when Belgian federal police saw a picture of it. Belgian police had been searching for 42-year-old Darshan Singh, a resident of Belgium, since June last year. The cafe on the lighter is near the victim’s home in Ravels, near the Dutch border. Investigators confirmed the victim’s DNA from a toothbrush.
UNITED STATES
Climate suit faces hurdle
A lawsuit by a group of young people who have said that the country’s energy policies are causing climate change and hurting their future faces a major hurdle. Three judges from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday heard arguments from 21 young people and the federal government in Portland, but were not expected to rule right away. “It is the constitutional duty of the government to protect public trust resources on which we all depend and to protect us from any damages that it may inflict upon its citizens,” said Aji Piper, one of the plaintiffs. “We are asking the courts to recognize our rights and see that the constitution demands that our rights be protected.”
UNITED STATES
Pioneering doctor dies
Patricia Bath, a pioneering ophthalmologist who became the first African-American female doctor to receive a medical patent after she invented a more precise treatment of cataracts, has died. She was 76. Her daughter said Bath died from complications of cancer on May 30 at a hospital in San Francisco. Bath was in the ophthalmology department at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the early 1980s, when she invented the Laserphaco Probe. The device offered less painful cataract treatment and restored the sight of patients who had been blind for decades.
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ￥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, was sacked yesterday, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and fallout from a report on the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “The Government unanimously approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA Director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said. He is to leave his post when his successor is appointed by April 10 at the latest, the statement said. Netanyahu on Sunday cited an “ongoing lack of trust” as the reason for moving to dismiss Bar, who joined the agency in 1993. Bar, meant to
Indonesia’s parliament yesterday amended a law to allow members of the military to hold more government roles, despite criticisms that it would expand the armed forces’ role in civilian affairs. The revision to the armed forces law, pushed mainly by Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto’s coalition, was aimed at expanding the military’s role beyond defense in a country long influenced by its armed forces. The amendment has sparked fears of a return to the era of former Indonesian president Suharto, who ex-general Prabowo once served and who used military figures to crack down on dissent. “Now it’s the time for us to ask the
‘HUMAN NEGLIGENCE’: The fire is believed to have been caused by someone who was visiting an ancestral grave and accidentally started the blaze, the acting president said Deadly wildfires in South Korea worsened overnight, officials said yesterday, as dry, windy weather hampered efforts to contain one of the nation’s worst-ever fire outbreaks. More than a dozen different blazes broke out over the weekend, with Acting South Korean Interior and Safety Minister Ko Ki-dong reporting thousands of hectares burned and four people killed. “The wildfires have so far affected about 14,694 hectares, with damage continuing to grow,” Ko said. The extent of damage would make the fires collectively the third-largest in South Korea’s history. The largest was an April 2000 blaze that scorched 23,913 hectares across the east coast. More than 3,000
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